Failover Cluster Node Startup Order in Windows Server 2012 R2

A while ago I came across an interesting article written by the Windows Server Core Team about the Failover Cluster Node Startup Order. As you might know, when creating a Failover Cluster you have three types of Qourum:

Cluster without a witness (Node Majority)

Cluster with a disk witness

Cluster with a file share witness

The best choice is to configure the cluster with a disk witness, since this way it doesn’t matter in which order are turned on back the hosts after a failover. The disk witness also holds a copy of the Cluster Database.

Meanwhile, if choosing a file share witness (which doesn’t have any copy of the cluster database) or without witness, the last host that was turned off, needs to be turned on the first in order to form the cluster back.